BELGRADE, Feb 15 (Hina) - All Serbian media reported on Saturday that the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague had issued an indictment against Serb Radicals' leader Vojislav Seselj and his statement that he had already bought a
plane ticket for Amsterdam for Feb. 24, that he was "going there by himself" and would not let the Serbian government extradite him.
BELGRADE, Feb 15 (Hina) - All Serbian media reported on Saturday
that the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague had issued an
indictment against Serb Radicals' leader Vojislav Seselj and his
statement that he had already bought a plane ticket for Amsterdam
for Feb. 24, that he was "going there by himself" and would not let
the Serbian government extradite him. #L#
Blic daily carries a statement Seselj made in connection with one
count of the indictment, which charges him with the expulsion of
Croats from Hrtkovci, a village in Serbia's northern region of
Vojvodina, in May 1992.
Seselj is quoted as saying that "not one Croat was ever expelled
from Serbia if he was a Yugoslav citizen. Property was not taken
from even one Croat here, those who left exchanged property, often
with the mediation of the Roman Catholic Church. In Hrtkovci there
is not one Croat-owned house from which a Croat was expelled to have
a Serb forcibly move in".
Seselj speaks of a meeting in the village on 6 May 1992 at which he
read out the names of Croats from Hrtkovci "who had left voluntarily
to join the Ustasha national guard corps". He says he read out their
names because, as citizens of Serbia, they had left "to fight for
the Ustasha state and oppress the Serb people".
Seselj was not the only Serbian official to speak in public after
Vojvodina Assembly president Nenad Canak recently announced that
he would testify about "the Hrtkovci case" in the Hague trial of
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
The minister for Serbs outside the country, Brana Crncevic, was one
of them, and another was Mirko Jovic, former leader of one of the
paramilitary units in the war against Croatia, who said that "not
one Croat was expelled from Serbia".
Glas javnosti daily today quotes Bela Tonkovic, president of the
Democratic Alliance of Croats in Vojvodina, as saying that Croats
were killed, their houses and land bombed, that they were
physically thrown out of their homes and brought in for interviews,
socially isolated, and lost their jobs on ethnic grounds, among
other things.
Tonkovic presented data showing that about 45,000 Croats were
expelled from Serbia after 1991, when the Serbian aggression in
Croatia began, as well as about more than 100 bombings and cases of
arson between 15 April 1991 and 1 December 1995, including the
destruction of Catholic churches, monasteries, and other
facilities in places whose residents were mostly Croatian.
(hina) ha